In Saturday’s (7/21) Los Angeles Times, Reed Johnson writes, “Along with millions of idealistic young men who were cut to pieces by machine guns and obliterated by artillery shells, there was another major casualty of World War I: traditional ideas about Western art. The Great War of 1914-18 tilted culture on its axis, particularly in Europe and the United States. … The simple answer as to what lay on the near side of World War I is Modernism, that slippery but indispensable term denoting a wide range of new sensibilities and aesthetic responses to the industrial age. … In ‘The Great War and Modern Memory,’ Paul Fussell argued that the rise of irony as a dominant mode of modern understanding ‘originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.’ Irony and dissonant humor permeated the music of classical composers such as Alban Berg and Benjamin Britten, a pacifist who parodied marching-band pomposity in his Piano Concert in D. … When war broke out in summer 1914, artists were among its biggest cheerleaders. … Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg initially drew analogies ‘between the German army’s assault on decadent France and his own assault on decadent bourgeois values’ and music, as the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross writes in ‘The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.’ ”
Posted July 24, 2012
